But she searched the papers for news, none the less. Allenby, the little town named for Matthew, where Dorothea had been born, seemed to be one source of trouble. She wondered sometimes if Dick went there often and if, when he passed Mrs. Olson’s gaunt little house, he remembered the time she had spent there. That reminded her of Fliss again. Her father and Della had asked her to spend Christmas with them, but she could not make up her mind to do that. The children were to have a Christmas with the kind of spirit she wanted, even if it would revive all sorts of painful memories for her. She had decided that and Della had shrugged her pretty shoulders and regretted and said that she and Walter would be sorry, for Gerald was going to a house party and wouldn’t be home and that they wouldn’t bother with a tree if Cecily wasn’t coming and that she thought that she would give Walter a bathrobe and that she thought further that Walter was going to get her a platinum wrist watch, which she knew he couldn’t afford but which she wanted “awfully.” Cecily thought he probably would. Little use as she had for Della’s methods she was reluctantly and truthfully admitting that Della had a way of keeping Walter happy. It reminded her of Fliss’s way with Matthew. Both of them put their husbands in the foreground, flattered them, coaxed them, played with them. And as Matthew had been amused and relaxed by such treatment, Walter was amused and impassioned. He quarreled with Della. That Cecily knew. But they could quarrel one hour and be absolutely and publicly enamored of each other during the next. The catastrophe of Walter’s marriage had somehow not come to pass. And the bitterest drop in Cecily’s cup was that she, who held marriage in deeper respect than either Della or Fliss, had been the only one of the three whose husband was left desolate and alone. Walter was working hard to make money for his Della. In spite of late hours and concentrated excitement he was making good in his father’s business. While Fliss was in Washington sending back or having sent back little items to adorn the social pages of Carrington’s newspapers already. “Senator and Mrs. Allenby were in attendance at” this and that function. Odd how Cecily could miss none of those little items, no matter how she tried to ignore them. On the first of December after looking over a horde of frightening bills, Cecily went to see her stepfather at his office. She chose the office as affording a chance for a less intimate meeting than one at her house. The array of clerks and stenographers and glazed doors made her feel very impersonal and keyed her up until she found herself confronting her stepfather over a glass-topped table and looked straight into his grave keen eyes. “What is it, Cecily? Do you need some money?” “I can’t get along on what I have. That house won’t run on two hundred and fifty dollars a month.”